Sunday, 25 June 2017

Players come in all different personalities. The outgoing and social
players can come with their own challenges, but what I found more
difficult was dealing with shy players. There are many different
reasons for a player to be shy and different methods are usually
needed for each. It's also generally easier for a social player to
realize they need to yield the stage compared to making a shy person
take it.

Circumstances

One of the things that can make a player shy is circumstance. It can
be hard to find a gaming group, and when you do the group has often
been around for some time. Jumping into that can be a challenge even
for social people. You don't only need to step up and take part in
the game, but also get to know everyone in the group. Public play has
a similar yet different problem. There, you also often end up playing
with a group of strangers but you might not run into the same people
next time. This could keep things constantly in that early stage
where you need to be getting to know the players as well as stepping
up in the game.

The public play option is probably the hardest to deal with. If you
are shy in those kinds of situations but don't have another way to
play, there isn't an easy solution. You usually just have to push
yourself to get involved. In a small group, however, it might take a
few sessions but once the player feels comfortable things tend to run
much smoother. Those sessions between joining and feeling
comfortable, however, can be rocky. In those cases it's important to
have something that they can contribute to. This means they need to
play a part and aren't completely ignored. However, you shouldn't be
dragging your player into the limelight when they don't want to be
there. That balance is a hard thing to find and varies depending on
the person. As they feel more comfortable, the balance can shift as
well.

Are They Happy?

The amount a player needs to contribute to a session to be happy
varies depending on the player and even the overall campaign. Players
are there for a multitude of reasons. Some want the tactical grid
combat and dungeon delving, some want the role-playing and some are
there to be part of and listen to a story. A shy player might be
happy with contributing to combat like everyone else, and
role-playing a little bit but not as much as the party's natural
actor. If they are happy, that's fine. The thing I will mention is
that power gamers/min-maxers tend to not go well with shy players
unless they also have such inclinations from my experience. It could be just the luck of the draw but min-maxing can threaten to push a shy player out of their niche. Of course, it also depends on the nature of the min-maxing and if they share the same class. It's just something to keep in mind.

Comfort

From what I've seen, comfort plays a big part for shy players. If
they feel comfortable even a shy player might end up speaking as
often as anyone else in the group. Part of this is the understanding
that failure is part of the game and tells a story. Getting mad at
someone because a combat encounter did not go well will create
discomfort and worry generally. It does so even for not shy players
on occasion. It's also important to remember that once they get
comfortable, one new player could be enough to make them
self-conscious.

They Want to Be
There

If they came to your game when they are shy, they want to be there.
If you are all strangers, you can be sure they really want to be
there since they are fighting their shyness to do so. They might not
always succeed, especially at the start, but I find keeping that in
mind generally helps. You don't want to blame them for it or for not
contributing as much as some other party members and you don't want
the other players to do so either. It might take some time, but I've
found generally things work out if you are patient, give them a
chance but don't push too hard.

Niche

What I find helps quite a bit is making sure the shy player has a niche and their own role. This means that they have a particular role in the group. Of course, this will put them as the centre of attention for at least a little but of time. It's along the same lines as what I said last week. However, in this case the focus will be expected so it tends to go over better. We don't want to dwell on it longer than we have to though. What that means in practice can be difficult to pin down but at the very least we don't want to focus on them heavily just because they haven't had focus. There should be a reason relating to their role or character and then take it off when it makes sense.

Conclusion

This is of course based on my experiences. If you have different
experiences or something you disagree with, I'd be happy to hear
about it. This is a short, general article and some specific
situations may need specific measures.

Sunday, 18 June 2017

Keeping all of your players involved and relevant is one of the
things a Dungeon Master wrestles with. However, it's also something
that is difficult to deal with. Magic items can do a lot to shift
player focus. This is especially true in combat. However, a clever
player can also make this happen in other areas of the game. There is
also the question of whether it is fine to have some players that are
focused more than others. What if you have a shy player? These are
the ideas and aspects I hope to work through by putting into words.

What Can Shift
Focus

I've already mentioned in passing that magic items can shift the
focus to one player or character. However, it goes further than that.
The location that something takes place in can also shift the focus.
If you have a character that is native to the area, they will
naturally be a focus for events in the story. The type of adventure
can also do a lot to make some characters more of a focus than
others. In D&D 5th edition they have what they call
the 3 pillars of the game (combat, exploration, and
role-play/interactions). Some classes are better and one than another
in certain situations. You might find that the situation or campaign
you came up with will naturally gravitate towards certain players or
their characters. There is also the question of player experience or
mastery of the rules. Some players can just work their skills and
weaknesses in amazing and clever ways that makes them shine.

Should All
Players Shine Equally?

When you first think about how players shine during the course of a
game, the first thought that usually comes to mind is that they
should all be equal. This isn't necessarily true. Or more precisely, what exactly does that mean? What I find is more
accurate is that there is a certain amount that if you don't meet,
your player(s) will feel unfulfilled. For some, this amount is more
than others. They'll also get to shine in different moments and not all moments are perceived equally. It might also depend on the long view of things as well.
They might want things to balance out in the long run, but for this
session they might be fine taking a back seat. After all, last week's
session was theirs.

Round Robin
Focus

You could try to make a few of your party members the centre of focus
for the session. The focus characters will be rotated between
sessions and the end result is that everyone roughly gets the same
amount of focus. It's kind of like when a TV show has episodes
focusing on different characters. Of course, not everyone likes that
kind of thing. It's also a bit different. You have the risk that
someone might accidentally hijack the session by doing something
clever or thinking outside the box. That might very well make sense, but it defeats the purpose of this approach.

Design
Situations

You could instead design the situations players will end up in.
Players will then decide how to approach the problem and when they
do, decide who will shine in that moment. It feels quite naturally
and lets the players decide who shines partially, but it still keeps
the possibility of someone being overshadowed.

You could also combine the two ideas above, which is what more often
happens naturally. You design situations for your players but you
might try to target some of the strength of your players. There will
be a combat encounter for your combat focused character, some kind of
social interaction, maybe a history related element, and end it with
a twist that involves one of your player characters.

Shy Players

Shy players are one of the harder ones to bring into the game. From
my experience, they tend not to need as much time shining to feel
like they contributed enough to the session. It can also be shining in a different way. You also don't really
want to try and force them into the centre of attention, especially
at the start. What I find typically works best is to let them get
comfortable and choose when to be the centre of attention. At first,
this might not seem to work. However, once they get used to the game
and the people they are playing with I've usually seen them have no
issue jumping in. I chose to say tend here because it really does depend on the person in question.

The early part can be a bit rough though. In this case, you probably
don't want to have someone else stepping on their toes all the time.
Having one rogue played by a shy person and another played by a
social butterfly is often a recipe to have the shy person
overshadowed (it isn't always the case, particularly if the two
builds are very different with very different skill sets). Some
overlap isn't so bad, since someone else can pick up some of the
slack just in case. However, there needs to be some individuality and
some cases where the shy character makes the most sense. It can also
be a problem when the shy person feels more comfortable and finds
themselves competing with someone else in the area that overlaps.

Accidentally
Overshadowing

There are some things, magic items in particular, that could cause a
player to be accidentally overshadowed. Easy access to healing magic
items in particular can make things harder for the cleric. Likewise,
certain magic items can make combat far easier for the player that
has them. I usually weight magic items that don't have a limited
number of uses very carefully to prevent this. Such items are fine,
however, if your party is lacking something. If your 2 player party
doesn't have a cleric but they have easy access to healing magic,
there isn't a problem. Otherwise, care should be taken. It can
especially be an issue at low levels. At that time even small bonuses
make large differences and access to abilities that target large
areas are disproportionately powerful. It's also a good idea to consider whether a magic item will make a particular class feature or character feature redundant. A sentient, and autonomous pair of lock picks can be a rogue's worst nightmare.

Sunday, 11 June 2017

You did it! You decided to be a Dungeon Master! We are happy to have
you join our ranks. However, now you need a campaign. Starting to
plan one out can be difficult, especially if you've never done it
before. So, let's talk about how to start planning one and what
approaches are available. Starting can be one of the hardest parts so
hopefully I'll be even a little bit of help. Feel free to ask questions as well.

Relax, You'll Be
Fine

First thing first. If you are running a game for the first time,
relax. It's not so scary. There is some responsibility and some
preparation work that goes into it but it'll be fine. We all had to
start at some time before getting where we are. Being a Dungeon
Master is a very fun and in a different way than being a player.

Do You Know Your
Players?

If you are starting off as a new Dungeon Master with a group you've
played with for a while, you'll know quite a bit about your players
and what kind of game they like to play. However, you might want to
ask them some questions ahead of time if you plan to try something
very different than they are used to. If you don't know your players
at all, it might be worth having a session to just talk about what
they want and taking care of the ground work. I find that with some of the
people I play with, this can be a tall order. Getting everyone
together in a physical place to take care of that can be tricky and
might not seem worth the effort for your players, though they'd be
willing to do it for an actual game. For this reason, this kind of
stuff quite often ends up in a pre-game Skype call from what I've
seen.

If you are playing with a brand new group, you should be asking
questions a head of time. You should also be ready to go in a
different direction if it turns out that what you had planned isn't
being received as well as you thought it would. You can do that, and
you should be prepared to. Even if it is being well received, it
could go in a direction you didn't expect. This is also true for
groups you know, but I find that new players are more surprising for
me until I get a feel for them. That's not to say the ones I'm used
to get boring and I can perfectly predict them, but I get more of a
feel for them. However, the first few sessions of a campaign can be
more fluid as you get things rolling.

Pre-Made

There is a large amount of pre-made material available for use in
tabletop role-playing games. Some will obviously have more material
than others. However, one strategy to start a campaign is to go into
the pre-made adventures or campaigns. It's a different set of skills
than coming up with a campaign from scratch, but it provides a
starting point. That starting point should in theory come from
someone with more experience than you and so help you make your first
campaign better. Even if you don't run it exactly as written (this is
very common), it can work as a good starting point and result in
encounters, characters, situations, and story that you wouldn't
otherwise think of. I will say though that you should make sure to
know what you want to do though. You aren't just running the
adventure as written; you'll be bringing it to life and making it
your own. This means you need to have a good feeling for it, even if
you are changing things.There will also always be blanks in the adventure that you'll need to fill in. I find it's best to see it as a reference and inspiration instead of a script that needs to be followed.

From Scratch

World First

You can start your own campaign by thinking about the sandbox it'll
take place in. Building up the world to have its own interesting
elements can help you come up with your own, hopefully unique,
conflict. Different worlds help inspire, or at the very least
reinforce, different kinds of stories because of their rules. It can
also allow an interesting place for your players to go feeling around
for what they want to go after. You can dangle multiple setups in
front of them and just go after the one that gets a bite. This
becomes a lot more enjoyable if the place that they are going through
is interesting. You don't need to come up with the entire world at
one time, but you should at least think about the place where things
will start.

Conflict First

Flipping things, you can think of the rough outline of your big
bad(s). Characters are an important part of stories and villains are
often the best remembered ones of them all. Making their motivations,
their means, and their power make sense goes a long way. It can also
help you come up with completely different stories when you come up
with a particular villain you've never thought of before. Villains
and conflict can also be very inspirational. A certain kind of
character, such as a classic vampire, might inspire a Gothic style
location (oh, hello Raveloft). It could also inspire a different
location by taking that classic style of villain and putting them in
an unfamiliar situation. Your conflict could be not centred around
one being either and instead be around a force of nature, a war
featuring many different complex threads but a small number of goals
at their centre, or something far more bizarre (as gods, hunting down
piece of an item that was never meant to enter the mortal realm over
centuries).

Tools

You can arrive at the same stories regardless of which of the above
you choose. It's just a technique to help get you thinking and it's
sometimes useful to change to the other to get the creative juices
flowing and coming up with new campaign ideas. If you are having
trouble coming up with an idea in the first place, trying one
approach and then the other can help you get some ideas you can turn
into a workable campaign after a couple more passes through the
above.

Too Many Ideas

That's great! Write them down. You never know when it might come in
handy. You might use one later for a subplot, or an alternate climax,
a new villain, the next story, etc. There are a lot of uses for such
a thing. Now, we need to pick one. Sometimes, it helps to just leave
it for a bit and look at them afterwards. Sometimes you'll find
yourself drawn to a couple while you are doing things and realize
that you really want to run one of those. If it's just one, that's
great! We got our idea. Otherwise, you might just need to sit down,
look at what your players want, look at what you have, reduce to a
smaller list and finally make a tough choice. This stuff will be
quite high level so it's very unlikely you'll be dooming yourself here.
However, the right idea can make things very easy going forward
because it makes role-playing and improvisation for you a breeze.

Sanity Check

When I have something that you want to run, I typically like to run
it through a sanity check. This takes the form of looking at the
situations and campaign as a player would and think about what
options I would have. What I'm trying to do here isn't predict what
my players will do, but make sure that the situations I have allow
for multiple solutions. A situation on its own might be fine, but the
next scenario might presume something about the previous. If I find
something like this, I'll either change it so it doesn't or note that
there will be a factor that influences the situation from before.
Depending on how the rest of the campaign goes before that point,
this factor may be different because of how my players dealt with it.
If it's so important that I can't leave it as just a note, it's
probably too railroady and I'll change it.

Sunday, 4 June 2017

All campaigns eventually come to an end. Hopefully it was because of
the natural end being reached instead of being left unfinished.
Regardless, we have to make decisions about what we will do next and these decisions can be extremely important for the success of the new
campaign. It's also not a very simple subject. As usual, I hope my
thoughts on the matter will be of some help.

Rolling Into the
Next One

One of the big things that need to be decide is whether a new
campaign will be started right away or a break will be taken. When I
say right away, I don't mean necessarily that things will continue on
the old schedule. The beginning of a campaign has a way of often
being more complex than a normal session because many details about
the world, characters, player characters and the general story going
forward needs to be thought up. However, you can still have the first
session of your new campaign scheduled in 2 or 3 weeks. I typically
like to do it this way because I find it is much easier to keep
things rolling if the people involved know when the next session is.
Trying to gather people back together after a break of unknown length
can be its own challenge. In some cases, this is very hard to avoid.
If it will be a month or so away it can be very difficult for people
to predict if they will be free. However, if they already liked
playing in your games and want more game time they will typically
give it their best shot.

Switching the
Dungeon Master

Rotating the roles can be a great way to mix things up. There are
some people who like to play and some who like to run the game. If
that's how the group runs and they are happy, that's great. However,
I've also seen groups where people enjoy being on both sides of a
game. It can also be helpful for a Dungeon Master to get some time to
let their ideas stew. Being able to have a campaign going and still
working on their next campaign can be an amazing blessing for a
Dungeon Master. One thing that I will warn about, however, is some
unintentional leaching. You might think of things that would make a
great addition to the campaign you are playing in but would be out of
place in your own. You also want to be wary of having your next
campaign being too similar to the current one as well.

New Campaign
Length

One of the decisions that tend to be made is about the length of a
new campaign. Many people want to just keep the game going until
interest is lost or they run out of things to do. Some, however,
prefer to have an ending in mind and work towards it. A short
campaign may just span levels 1-5. The nice thing about shorter
campaigns is that they can be extended and built on if needed. It
also means that a suitable and manageable big bad can be chosen for
the planned range. The risk is that things may seem a bit disjointed
if no thought towards the next possible extension is made before the
end. I find many people make these kinds of decisions even if they
don't realize it. These choices can be seen from elements such as
world building, enemy choices, magic items presented and sometimes
even player advice (when it comes to character building, some builds
work better than others at certain level ranges).

Switching Groups

The end of a campaign can be a good time to switch groups if things
weren't going well. I also find that it's easier to handle when a
player leaves at the end of a campaign compared to leaving in the
middle of one. That way, it gives time to find other players if
needed instead of scrambling in the middle. There is also the barrier
of getting the new players caught up and integrated so they don't
feel left out, which is avoided when a new campaign is being made.

Taking A Break

Personally, I view this option as a last resort. I find it much
harder to find the time later instead of when I already have time
scheduled. It can also be a bit hard to jump back in due to some of
the reasons I mentioned earlier. Campaigns can run longer or shorter
than expected but they typically run a few months at least from my
experience. However, if in a slump it can be a great way to get rid
of fatigue and get excited about the game again. I've seen some
people for who this works great. Personally though, I prefer playing
anyway and the fatigue goes away on its own when new, exciting
situations are encountered.